The last words of condemned Texans

I was fascinated to learn last week that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice puts the last statements of the people it executes on its Web site. That’s 444 people as of this writing, dating back to December 1982.

I extracted the statements and uploaded them as one large file to Many Eyes, which has some great tools for visualizing, analyzing and playing with text.

Here are the statements displayed as a tag cloud:

 

The most frequently used words of those about to die were “love” and “family.”

You can also see the most frequently used two-word phrases. Here “stay strong” was used twice as often as “Jesus Christ."

Four inmates One inmate spoke of the “Polunsky dungeon,” which Google tells me is a reference to the “Polunsky Unit,” where the condemned are housed before they die.

Another tool offered by Many Eyes is a word tree, which lets you pick a word or phrase and shows you the different contexts in which it appears.

Here’s one for the condemned who said “innocent”:

 

More of these, along with the text file I used, can be found here. I didn’t clean the data perfectly, so there are flaws. Not all of the condemned had final statements, either.

“Let’s do it, man. Lock and load. Ain’t life a [expletive deleted]?”